I want to use my GeForce5900 with the actual driver 1.0-5332. But all what I get is a black screen or ASCII stuff and a pressed reset-button for reboot.
Here is what I tried:

try1: my SuSE installation uses kernel 2.4.21-193. The installation process of the downloaded .run file worked fine. I compiled the driver and installed it into the modules section. So far no problem. But after restarting X all I got was a black screen or some ASCII stuff and a complete freeze. I've found no error logs for this problem. The loaading of the module via insmod works with no problem.

try 2: I updated the distri to an unsupported 2.6.2 kernel. Damn fast...but no chance for compiling the driver. The installer says something about kernel headers, but the sources are installed. A manual compilation failes because of this error message: "gcc is not the version which compiled the kenel" or something like this. And exists...but when have sometimes can compile this beast I fear I will get the black screen error again.

What now? Have I a chance of using my card under this distribution? For a Linux newbie like me a big problem.

I believe you may need to supply
export IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH=1
and
--kernel-include-path=/path/to/you/src
where /path/to/your/src is the include subdir where you built the kernel; also you may need to copy that ./config/modversions.h to the include path provided above. That solved my problems for 2.4.xxx.

Apparently there's a new way to link against kernel includes and that's /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/include, but modversions.h never made it there either.

I got this to compile on 2.4.xxx but can't for 2.6.3 on SuSe 9.0 for AMD64.

You will need to patch the 1.0-5332 driver release in order to be able to use it with Linux 2.6 kernels; the new family of kernels insists that the exact same compiler be used for the kernel and kernel modules. As to the black screen, make sure you have vesafb disabled and experiment with the AGP configuration (should the problem persist with Linux 2.6).